Speaking My Mind

This is something of a counterintuitive idea: Comments should be meaningless What, I hear you ask, are you talking about? Comments should communicate to the reader! At least that is the received conventional wisdom handed does over the last few centuries (decades at least). Well, certainly, if you are programming in Assembler, or C, then yes, comments should convey meaning because the programming language cannot So, conversely, as a comment on the programming language itself, anytime the programmer feels the imperative to write a meaningful comment it is because the language is not able to convey the intent of the programmer. I have already noticed that I write far fewer comments in my Java programs than in my C programs.  That is because Java is able to capture more of my meaning and comments would be superfluous. So, if a language were able to capture all of my intentions, I would never need to write a comment. Hence the title of this blog.

Sometimes a restriction in a programming language makes sense and no sense at all — all at the same time. Modeling the real world Think about the Java restrictions on the modeling of classes: a given class can only have one supertype and a given object's class is fixed for its lifetime. From a programming language perspective these restrictions make a good deal of sense: all kinds of ambiguities are possible with multiple inheritance and the very idea of allowing an object to be 'rebased' fills the compiler writer with horror. (Though SmallTalk allows it.) The problem is that, in real life, these things do happen. A 'natural' domain model is quite likely to come up with situations involving multiple inheritance and dynamic rebasing. For example, a person can go from being a customer, to an employee, to a manager to being retired. A given person might be both an employee and a customer simultaneously (someone else may not be). Given a domain that is as flexible as th...